Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
3,429 topics in this forum
-
- 0 replies
- 325 views
I don’t really love Halloween, but I love one of its main characters. I love Dracula. I don’t even care about vampires but I care about Dracula, and, not to presume that the readers of this site are particularly attuned to the oeuvres of any one of its writers, but if you have noticed a glut of Dracula content on CrimeReads throughout the past few years, especially around this season, it’s probably because of me. I love Dracula, from Transylvania to London and back again. So, if you’re looking for something to watch this Halloween weekend, I ask you to look no further than Halloween’s undying great-great grandfather. But which Dracula movie should you choose? There are l…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 288 views
I came to horror the same way I came to Rihanna—later than most, but with the commensurate fiery passion of a true convert. Crime and horror have, after all, been slowly converging for many years, as domestic suspense transformed into the New Gothic, and psychological thrillers took over from procedurals as the dominant trend in the genre. And yet, despite my newfound fandom, I’m about as poorly informed a horror reader as one could be (I’ve only read one Stephen King novel and it was Mr Mercedes). So I invited a whole bunch of authors with horror novels out in 2021 to join me for a roundtable discussion on the genre and its appeal to crime fans, and in which I could stea…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 282 views
After mom confessed to binging on Creature Feature/Chiller Theater flicks when she was pregnant with me, I realized that my passion for horror was in the blood. By the time I was seven I’d already seen Night of the Living Dead, which gave me nightmares for a week, and was a regular viewer of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, One Step Beyond and horror/monster movies on Saturday nights. As a comic book fan since I was a six year old New York City kid, my tastes eventually swayed from Marvel’s Manhattan-based superheroes to spooky four-color supernatural strips. While comic book shopping in 1972, I spotted The House of Mystery #204. The cover featured a disgusting multi…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 716 views
CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debuts in crime, mystery, and thrillers. * Erin Mayer, Fan Club (MIRA) If Catie Disabato and Amina Akhtar had written the screenplay for Josie and the Pussycats, it might read something like Fan Club. In former Bustle editor Erin Mayer’s blistering debut, her millennial narrator is bored out of her mind working at a women’s magazine, obsessing over the beauty editor’s many freebies and taking as many coffee breaks as possible. “One day, she finds new purpose in the hidden meanings of a pop star’s new hit, joining a devoted group of superfans whose dedication to their diva knows no bounds. What’s the true meaning behind the …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 240 views
“Jordan, we’re live in sixty,” said Tracy Klein, my favorite field producer, nudging me to get into place. “Okay, hang on,” I said, distracted by a rush of butterflies and the sudden urge to pee, which happened every single time I was about to go on the air. I guess it was my body’s way of preparing me for the moment that never got old, but soon panic struck. My earpiece was in, but the anchors’ voices sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents. “Hey, you guys. I can’t hear. You’re not coming through very clearly. The echo is killing me,” I said. I looked up. Please, not today. In an instant, the sky darkened over historic Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, a sign of the…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 244 views
The latest Jack Reacher novel begins just as you would wish it to: Reacher, walking west through the desert, no particular destination in mind, poised for the fates. There’s a border nearby, and a border town. Before all that he finds a car accident and a woman with a strange story about a wayward brother. As much as any Reacher novel, Better Off Dead is a western, brooding and brutal and sunburnt in that fine tradition. In anticipation of the book’s release, I caught up with Lee Child and Andrew Child, brothers and now co-authors of the Reacher series, to ask them a few questions about borders, villains, and how a Reacher novel comes together in 2021. Dwyer Murphy: Ther…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 534 views
Travel through time and space with October’s best international thrillers, some set in the past, and some concerned with fractured memory and never-solved crimes. Whether you’re interested in picking up a Nordic noir, immersing yourself in a French gothic thriller, or staying up late with a South Korean thriller, these international crime books are the perfect pulse-pounding reads to warm you up this fall. Kjell Ola Dahl, The Assistant Translated by Don Bartlett Orenda Books Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in Europe in the late 1930s, a cheating spouse is never just a cheating spouse (especially when a PI gets involved). In this historical Scandi noir set dur…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 224 views
So, let’s talk about sex. One of the things editors and readers often say about my novel Arya Winters and the Tiramisu of Death is that there is rather a lot of sex and swearing in it, darling. Yes, it’s a crime novel. Yes, the crime has something to do with sex. No, the crime-related sex is never graphic. Up to here, everything is fine. Even for a village-y, (dare I say it?) cozy mystery. What’s not such an easy sell is that there is fun sex in it. A young, single mixed-race woman quite enjoys sex and she gets to now and again have quite enjoyable sex in the novel, some of it on the page. Herein lies the problem. There are sex tropes in crime fiction. The alcoholic, m…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 229 views
Whenever I think of the fall season, I always think of thrillers. Yes, there is football, and pumpkin-flavored coffee drinks, and hay rides, and all those fun things, too, but the moment the air turns crisp and the nights begin to get longer—and darker—as Halloween approaches, I find myself gravitating toward the darker pleasures, especially in my books. Ghosts. Vampires. Witches. Zombies. You name it, I read it. The supernatural element in stories always gives a great scare, but sometimes what I find most terrifying are the dangers lurking here in the real world. What happens when Mother Nature—and us humans—become the monsters? If pushed to the limits, to what lengths w…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 222 views
At ten o’clock on Tuesday, June 23, 1981, three FBI agents arrived at Hughes Aircraft’s headquarters on East Imperial Highway in El Segundo. A corporate security officer had been expecting them. He summoned Bill Bell. The agents spoke with Bell for two hours at Hughes, then suggested lunch. Bell agreed. After sandwiches at a deli, they asked Bell to accompany them to a room at the Holiday Inn on Century Boulevard where they could talk more. Bell agreed again. The agents interrogated Bell throughout the afternoon. It was all very civil and businesslike. Special Agent James Reid showed Bell a translation of a Polish newspaper article on a Polish diplomat assigned to the…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 256 views
Another week, another batch of books for your TBR pile. Happy reading, folks. * Andrew Child, Lee Child, Better Off Dead (Delacorte Press) “The Child brothers’ superb second collaboration (after 2020’s The Sentinel) opens one night at a remote spot on the U.S.-Mexico border, where “the stranger,” a large, tall man many will assume is Jack Reacher, has arrived for a meeting.” Publishers Weekly, starred review James Kestral, Five Decembers (Hard Case Crime) “Hardboiled fiction at its best: an exceptional tale, filled with emotion.” Library Journal, starred review Erin Mayer, Fan Club (MIRA) “Erin Mayer bursts onto the scene as a fresh new voice with som…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 258 views
OK, let’s deal with the elephant in the room from the get-go—some people have suggested that Frankfurt is a bit boring. There, it’s out there. I rarely hear a good word said about Germany’s fifth largest city. And there are reasons to agree. Anyone who’s been stuck in the city at one of its many conferences or conventions (including the giant annual Frankfurt Book Fair) has probably experienced the city’s anonymous hotels and conference centres. The French crime and historical fiction writer Hubert Monteilhet went in the 1970s and was so bored he wrote a satirical crime novel, Murder at the Frankfurt Bookfair (1976)! And there’s a lot of ‘70s high rise architecture that’s…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 264 views
Imagine you’re a mother planting blueberry bushes at home in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains when your four-year-old son approaches excitedly, saying, “Mommy, close your eyes, close your eyes!” You do, of course, expecting a live frog or a dead dragonfly, but when you’re told to look you find yourself staring into the empty eye sockets of a human skull. Motherhood. Small tear or joy. This may sound like a page out of one of my crime novels, but it’s a true story that happened in 2017 near Maple Falls, Washington, and the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office—my employer—responded. When I got word of the unusual find I did what any good crime analyst would and started…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 224 views
In my latest book, Femlandia, a character says, “Anything a man can do, a woman can do equally as well.” But is this the case when it comes to being evil? When I decided to write this piece about women behaving badly in literature, I thought (foolishly, it turns out) I would end up with a stack of books so high that whittling the choices down would be the hard work. Instead, finding enough contemporary books with villainesses was incredibly difficult. Cruella De Vil, the Grand High Witch, and Mrs. Trunchbull might feature on the pages of children’s novels, but modern thrillers tend to be packed with bad men doing the awful deeds. Author Gillian Flynn has addressed the lac…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 758 views
One should regularly refresh one’s acquaintance with the classics, for it is always an instructive exercise. What we imagine we remember of them as often as not turns out to be a hotchpotch of fragments retained from sleepy mishearings at bedtime, from condensed and bowdlerised ‘versions for children’ devoured on rainy Saturday afternoons—amongst an older generation, Dell Comics have a lot to answer for—and, above all, from the cinema. Bram Stoker’s Dracula in particular suffers, some might say gains, by association with the many film adaptations that have been made of it, although ‘adaptation’ is not always the justified word. In most of our minds now, when we think of t…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 235 views
Hey, America doesn’t get to do all the podcasts! The rest of us can have a go too. So, it must be time for another round up of the best true crime podcasts (in English) from around the world… ___________________________________ Ireland/UK ___________________________________ The Nobody Zone (RTÉ) Was a homeless Irishman in London really a serial killer at large for thirty years? In 1983 Kieran Patrick Kelly confessed to multiple murders. Originally from Rathdowney, in County Laois, Kelly spent the majority of his youth in Dublin before moving to England in the 1950s. Like so many Irishmen who made the journey across the Irish Sea to work in Britain, he found life ha…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 704 views
“Fair is Foul, Foul is Fair”—Macbeth Note: This essay in its original form appeared a decade ago this month in a pamphlet with a small print run published by CADS: Crime and Detective Stories. With minor modifications it appears now, on its tenth anniversary, before a much larger audience at Crimereads. Today’s readers may notice how “Corinne” anticipated other studies from the past decade of the 2010s, which collectively have greatly altered views of vintage crime fiction. –CE ___________________________________ Part I: The Members of the Club ___________________________________ Great Britain’s Detection Club, officially formed in London in 1930 by twenty-eight my…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 243 views
You know what’s truly scary? Deciding to introduce a supernatural element to your thriller or mystery novel. You see, a thriller and/or mystery story depends on the writer achieving rock-solid suspension of disbelief, but the second you begin hinting at ghostly goings on, or perhaps the existence of fairies, you essentially tear down the world you’ve constructed for your trusting readers and ask them to step into a new, less certain one. But sometimes, it works. And sometimes a writer manages to do something that’s so wildly imaginative and wholly believable that it seeps into your subconscious and hooks into a primal stratum of fear. My novel The Lighthouse Witches is a…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 187 views
The first time I found myself crawling through a burning building wasn’t the realization of a life-long dream. Instead, my thoughts were “What the f*ck am I doing here?” As things calmed down that day, it occurred to me that this was a strange way to earn a living. I’ve now been a member of the Philadelphia Fire Department for thirty-six years. When I began to write seriously, it was only natural my job be integral. I write crime fiction and most of my work is written from the point of view of the criminal, largely because that’s what I enjoy but it’s also a product of my time in the fire service. The narrator of my novels, Three Hours Past Midnight and A Few Days Away, …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 209 views
LISBON, PORTUGAL DAY 1. 7:28 A.M. Ariel awakens, alone. Sunlight is streaming through the gap between the shutters, casting a stark column of brightness on the wall, nearly painful to look at. She’s hot. She flings aside the sheet, toward the other side of the bed, where her new husband should be, but isn’t. Her eyes jump around the room, as if hopping on stones across a stream, looking for evidence of John, but find none, plummeting her into the fast frigid water of a famil iar panic: What if she’s wrong about him? About this whole thing? The bedside clock displays 7:28 in emergency red. Much later than she normally awakes, especially this time of year, the busies…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 241 views
Halloween and crime fiction go together like witches and broomsticks. It’s the perfect time of year for mayhem and murder. As the days get shorter, we settle into darkness of all kinds, and crime fiction becomes the perfect Fall read. I’ve always been obsessed with Halloween. It’s my birthday, for one. It’s also the time of the year when we can flirt with otherwise often taboo subjects like death, spirits, terror. When I was thinking about writing about the dark side of suburban life for my second novel, The Mother Next Door, I couldn’t think of a better time to set it than during Halloween. What’s creepier than a secluded upper-middle-class cul-de-sac, a group of clique…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 208 views
Look, romance isn’t easy, especially in a world where you can’t let yourself get attached to anything you’re not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. But that doesn’t mean you don’t put yourself out there, boats against the current, returning again and again to the same diners drinking the same lousy coffee looking for that spark when someone sits down on the stool next to you, asks for the cream, takes out a folded- snapshot they’ve been carrying around for years and the snapshot is their soul. But how do you find the right person, the right words, the right sharkskin suit? Every now and again you need outside counsel, a …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 236 views
I like people who are wrong. At least in literature. You can have your brainiacs like Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes, I’ll take my saps and suckers, guys who get themselves in and out of trouble as they try to figure out what the hell is going on. They usually think they know more than they do, so they go where they shouldn’t go, do what they shouldn’t do, and say what they shouldn’t say, usually making matters worse, for themselves and for others. Of course characters have been nosing down the wrong alley ever since Oedipus traveled to Thebes and raised questions about fate, identity, and unintended consequences, some of the essential elements of good crime fiction. …
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 690 views
Hello, readers of the thriller! If life isn’t rough enough for you here are some books that will make you think, Hell, she’s got it worse than I do. This is known as the First Law of Exploitation in the Official Crime Writers Handbook, which is like the DSM-IV with a body count. And the book is terribly hard to find, and quite expensive. Let’s see what the writers are up to in October. Tara Laskowski, The Mother Next Door (Graydon House) Ivy Woods Drive—sounds classy, doesn’t it? A lush cul-de-sac in a fancy suburb where the women all wear athleisure and plan parties and the men spend their time at work or on the golf course. You get it. In Mother, Laskowski has cre…
Last reply by Admin_99, -
- 0 replies
- 217 views
When I was a little girl, on Saturdays my mother made me take off my jeans and Keds and don a frilly dress, my Sunday shoes, ruffled socks, and white gloves. This was to go shopping in downtown Nashville. Mama loved to shop. I realize now that was because she had been raised so poor that store-bought was about the best thing in the world for her. I, however, hated shopping and I hated those clothes. But I loved Harvey’s. There were other department stores on Church Street, and we shopped in them, too, but Harvey’s was the best by far. It had a cage full of monkeys that climbed, screeched, and scratched while you ate lunch, and it also had escalators. They were the first I…
Last reply by Admin_99,